Community Digest

Top new questions this week:

Was it possible to complete the third rotation in Killer Gorilla?

As a kid I played a lot of Killer Gorilla on the BBC micro. This game was a clone of Donkey Kong. Like Donkey Kong it had four levels, which the game rotated through and on each rotation they got ...

bbc-micro  
user avatar asked by Peter Green Score of 4
user avatar answered by scruss Score of 6

What was the first satellite data link that can properly be called an internet connection?

Scott Manley, in his second video about communication satellites, focusing on the 1963 Telstar 1, mentioned at 10:22: (Telstar 1) could be used for telephones it could carry multiple circuits, it ...

history internet data-transfer  
user avatar asked by uhoh Score of 3
user avatar answered by Raffzahn Score of 8

How to read old Macintosh text files?

I hope this is an OK place to ask this question. The Internet Archive has a Macintosh floppy image containing presets for an old E-mu synthesizer module. The page is here Proteus Preset Libraries ...

hfs macintosh  
user avatar asked by aMike Score of 2

Greatest hits from previous weeks:

What algorithm did Microsoft use to dither colour in early versions of Windows?

In the late 1980s to mid 1990s, most consumer-class video hardware was not capable of displaying greater than 16 colours at a time. To create the illusion of greater colour, software often "blended" ...

windows-3.x dithering  
user avatar asked by Mike Nielsen Score of 183
user avatar answered by phyrfox Score of 169

Why is EEPROM called ROM if it can be written to?

Is there a historical reason? Since it is rewritable it isn't read only by definition, so why call it so?

memory rom terminology  
user avatar asked by Michael Stachowsky Score of 40
user avatar answered by dirkt Score of 99

Looking for a PC 2D platformer game from the mid-2000s or earlier

I'm trying to find the name of a PC game I used to play as a kid in the early/mid-2000s. All I remember from it is that it was a 2D platformer and that one of the levels looked like the following ...

gaming identify-this-game  
user avatar asked by RedForBlue102 Score of 41
user avatar answered by shf301 Score of 74

Where did the free parameters of IEEE 754 come from?

It's clear where many of the design decisions of IEEE 754 floating point come from. For example, the binary format maximizes efficiency on binary hardware. And 32 and 64 bits for single and double ...

history floating-point  
user avatar asked by rwallace Score of 44
user avatar answered by phuclv Score of 68

Why did C have the return type before function names?

In general, there are two types of syntax of defining functions - Something like C, C++, C#, or Java (int functionName(char arg)) vs the ML (and others) tradition of defining the return type after the ...

history c  
user avatar asked by Unix Score of 53
user avatar answered by Stephen Kitt Score of 73

Why was the Kickstart 1.x "Insert floppy" graphic so bad?

Anyone who used an pre-Kickstart 2.0 Amiga will be very familiar with the "Insert Workbench floppy" image: I realise that this is subjective, but the image has always stuck me as ... well, a bit ugly....

amiga  
user avatar asked by KenD Score of 74
user avatar answered by Jukka Aho Score of 46

How to use ISA card in modern PC

(Posted this on HW Rec but got no responses.) Would like to use an ISA expansion card in a modern PC. There are Expensive PCI - ISA adapters (but I cannot find any actually for sale now) USB-ISA ...

ibm-pc isa  
user avatar asked by Tomas By Score of 24
user avatar answered by tofro Score of 17
You're receiving this message because you subscribed to the Retrocomputing community digest.
Unsubscribe from this community digest       Edit email settings       Leave feedback       Privacy
Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow, 14 Wall Street, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10005

<3